Blackadder, a BBC sitcom from the ’80s starring Rowan Atkinson, happens to be my favourite TV show. The following, are some of my favourite quotes from the series.
The quotes have been copied from BBC.com’s Blackadder page as I am too lazy to recall and write every quote on my own. Besides, I have the memory of an amnesiac goldfish.
Black Adder (series 1)
Blackadder: If we lose, I’ll be chopped into pieces. My arm’ll end up in Essex, my torso in Norfolk and my genitalia stuck up a tree somewhere in Rutland.
Blackadder: Let all men who go to don armour tomorrow remember to go before they don armour tomorrow.
Blackadder: Morris dancing is the most fatuous, tenth-rate entertainment ever devised by man. Forty effeminate blacksmiths waving bits of cloth they’ve just wiped their noses on. How it’s still going on in this day and age I’ll never know.
King Richard: Blood! Death! War! Rumpy pumpy! Triumph!
Blackadder(upon being told about his mother’s adultery): Don’t be absurd. Such activities are totally beyond my mother. My father only got anywhere with her because he told her it was a cure for diarrhoea.
The King: If you cross me, now or ever, I shall do unto you what God did unto the Sodomites, understand?
Blackadder: As my tutor, old bubble face, used to say: “make love and be merry, for tomorrow you may catch some disgusting skin disease.”
The Queen: Look at the two love birds!
Blackadder: One love bird and one love elephant.
Percy: Only this morning in the courtyard I saw a horse with two heads and two bodies.
Blackadder: Two horses standing next to each other?
Blackadder (to Percy): You ride a horse rather less well than another horse would. Your brain would make a grain of sand look large and ungainly and the part of you that can’t be mentioned, I am reliably informed by women around the Court, wouldn’t be worth mentioning even if it could be.
King: St Juniper once said; ‘By his loins shall ye know him, and by the length of his rod shall he be measured.’
Blackadder II (series 2)
Blackadder: ‘Yes, it is’, not ‘That it be’. You don’t have to talk in that stupid voice to me. I’m not a tourist.
Flashheart: Thanks, Bridesmaid. Like the beard. Gives me something to hang on to.
Blackadder: We live in an age where illness and deformity are commonplace and yet, Ploppy, you are without a doubt the most repulsive individual I have ever met. I would shake your hand but I fear it would come off.
Blackadder: Bloody explorers, ponce off to Mumbo Jumbo land, come home with a tropical disease, a suntan and a bag of brown lumpy things, and Bob’s your uncle, everyone’s got a picture of them in lavatory.
Percy: Don’t be ridiculous, Baldrick. You know me. I mean, I laugh in the face of fear and tweak the nose of the dreadful spindly killer fish.
Blackadder: The path of my life is strewn with cowpats from the devil’s own satanic herd.
Blackadder: This place stinks like a pair of armoured trousers after the Hundred Years War. Baldrick, have you been eating dung again?
Blackadder: The eyes are open, the mouth moves, but Mr Brain has long since departed, hasn’t he, Perce? (The greatest put-down of all times)
Melchett (very drunk): You twist and turn like a … twisty-turny thing. I say you are a weedy pigeon and you can call me Susan if it isn’t so.
Baldrick: Not to worry my lord, the arrow didn’t in fact enter my body.
Blackadder: Oh good.
Baldrick: No, by a thousand to one chance my willy got in the way.
Blackadder on Baldrick: Kate, he looks like what he is: a dung ball in a dress.
Blackadder: Oh, God, God, God! What on earth was I drinking last night? My head feels like there’s a Frenchman living in it.
Ludwig: You find yourself amusing, Blackadder.
Blackadder: I try not to fly in the face of public opinion.
Blackadder the Third (series 3)
Blackadder: If you want something done properly, kill Baldrick before you start.
George: Now I’ve got my lovely fire I’m happy as a Frenchman who’s invented a pair of self-removing trousers.
Blackadder: Baldrick, believe me, eternity in the company of Beelzebub and all his hellish instruments of death will be a picnic compared to five minutes with me and this pencil if we can’t replace this dictionary.
Blackadder: “Something is always wrong, Balders. The fact that I am not a millionaire aristocrat with the sexual capacity of a rutting rhino is a constant niggle.
George: Why, only the other day Prime Minister Pitt called me an idle scrounger. It wasn’t until ages later that I thought how clever it could have been to have said, “Oh bugger off, you old fart!” I need to improve my mind Blackadder. I want people to say, “That George, why he’s as clever as a stick in a bucket of pig swill.”
Blackadder: You see the ancient Greeks, your Highness, wrote in legend of a terrible container in which all the evils of the world were trapped. How prophetic they were. All they got wrong was the name. They called it ‘Pandora’s Box’, when of course they meant ‘Baldrick’s Trousers’.
French Ambassador: I hate you English. With your boring trousers and your shiny toilet paper and your ridiculous preconceptions that Frenchmen are great lovers. I’m French and I’m hung like a baby carrot and a couple of petits pois.
Blackadder: Am I jumping the gun, Baldrick, or are the words ‘I have a cunning plan’ marching with ill-deserved confidence in the direction of this conversation?
Blackadder: They do say, Mrs M, that verbal insults hurt more than physical pain. They are, of course, wrong, as you will soon discover when I stick this toasting fork into your head.
Blackadder: I’m as poor as a church mouse, that’s just had an enormous tax bill on the very day his wife ran off with another mouse, taking all the cheese.
Blackadder: Baldrick, have you no idea what irony is?
Baldrick: Yes, it’s like goldy and bronzy only it’s made out of iron.
Blackadder: Ha ! I laugh at danger and drop ice cubes down the vest of fear.
Blackadder: The girl is wetter than a haddock’s bathing costume.
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George: I’m a gay bachelor, Blackadder. I’m a roarer, a rogerer, a gorger and a puker! I can’t marry, I’m young, I’m firm buttocked…
Blackadder: Mrs M, if we were the last three humans on earth, I would be trying to start a family with Baldrick.
Blackadder: A man may fight for many things. His country, his friends, his principles, the glistening tear on the cheek of a golden child. But personally, I’d mud-wrestle my own mother for a ton of cash, an amusing clock and a sack of French porn.
Blackadder Goes Forth (series 4)
Blackadder (to Baldrick): ‘If you were to serve up one of your meals in Staff HQ, you would be arrested for the greatest mass poisoning since Lucretia Borgia invited 500 of her close friends round for a wine and anthrax party.’
George on waiting for orders: ‘When are we going to give Fritz a taste of our British spunk?’
George on being a lawyer: ‘I’m a complete duffer at this sort of thing. In the School Debating Society I was voted ‘boy least likely to complete a coherent…’ erm…’
Blackadder: ‘Morning George, morning Baldrick. Still the striking resemblance to guppy fish at feeding time.’
Blackadder: ‘Everything goes over your head, doesn’t it, George? You should go to Jamaica and become a limbo dancer.’
Blackadder(regarding George’s drag act): ‘Personally I thought you were the least convincing female impressionist since Tarzan went through Jane’s handbag and ate her lipstick, but I’m clearly in a minority.’
Blackadder: ‘Baldrick, in the Amazonian rain forests there are tribes of Indians as yet untouched by civilisation who have developed more convincing Charlie Chaplin impressions than yours.’
George: Crikey, sir. I’m looking forward to today. Up diddly up, down diddly down, whoops, poop, twiddly dee – decent scrap with the fiendish Red Baron – bit of a jolly old crash landing behind enemy lines – capture, torture, escape, and then back home in time for tea and medals.
Blackadder: George, who is using the family brain cell at the moment?
Flashheart: ‘If word gets out that I’m missing, 500 girls will kill themselves and I wouldn’t want them on my conscience – not when they ought to be on my face!’
Red Baron: ‘How lucky you English are to find the toilet so amusing. For us, it is a mundane and functional item. For you it is the basis of an entire culture.’
Blackadder: ‘I’ve no desire to hang around with a bunch of upper-class delinquents, do twenty minutes’ work and then spend the rest of the day loafing about in Paris drinking gallons of champagne and having dozens of moist, pink, highly experienced French peasant girls galloping up and down my – hang on…’
Melchett: ‘If nothing else works, a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.’
Blackadder: ‘I lost closer friends than “darling Georgie” the last time I was deloused.’
